Ridesharing in Rural Areas with Autonomous Electric Vehicles and Interrelated Trips

Passenger cars are responsible for 44% of the greenhouse gas emissions within Europe's transportation sector. Especially rural areas are still fundamentally dependent on private motor vehicles, which is why in particular the younger and older population in such regions is limited in their mobility. The purpose of this paper is to determine the potential of shared, electric, autonomous vehicles to close the aforementioned mobility gap in an eco-friendly manner. It provides recommendations for the implementation of the associated transport services in terms of vehicle battery size and charging station infrastructure. For this purpose, we present a model for the electric autonomous dial-a-ride problem with interrelated trips (e-ADARP-IT), which is solved by a commercial solver and through a Variable Neighborhood Search heuristic. Computational experiments reveal the superior performance of the heuristic. It is shown that large shares of requested trips can be served efficiently at low operational cost. Results further indicate that expanding vehicle battery capacity seems more relevant than expanding the number of charging stations, even though both developments clearly have to go hand in hand.